Thomas Hulvershorn– Oberon media / I-Play

Thomas Hulvershorn– Oberon media / I-Play
Director of QA & Certification/ Deployment Operations at Oberon Media
Thomas is QA lead at Oberon media and I have worked with him before in LiveQA testing.
Oberon media focuses upon game for the casual audience and provides simple to play games, However Thomas also manages a set of facebook games with focus on Bubbletown.
Thomas focused upon the way that their data infrastructure is built and how it runs. First of all how all the data for the game is outsourced to an external set of servers and that it would not be uncommon to see most social media games do this as well as MMO’s.
The current game market is based around “Freemium” games and content in which Thomas definitely deals with facebooks gaming which by their nature are freemium in which players can pay for additional content towards their game.
However what I hadn’t expected was for Thomas to talk about free games as a service which is true. Since the player is not paying for anything all the player is doing is accessing a free entertainment service A.K.A a free game.
One main benefit of having an online based game is that they can be made to be capable of monitoring everything that a player does, and then tailor the game experience to the actions of players.
Finally Thomas went on to talk about how QA is not just “Game testing” it’s a profession.
Bcs – ISTQB Test manager
Can see the whole project
Test managers focus upon the following issues:
How many testers are needed?
Quality assurance
What resources are needed?
The effect of this project on another project based on a shared time resource
Test product reporting
Team test leaders usually Create the testing plan for a game
Runs the resting plan
Keeps track of current open issues (Bugs)
Creates reports
Manages a test team.
Test analysts
A.K.A a game testing role
Carries out constant testing on a product.
Logs their test results and Logs Bugs.
Other than talking about some of the roles within QA he then went on to talk about what should and shouldn’t be on a AV when applying for a QA role at a company.
Don’t just use agencies to get a job in the games industry. (It has also been said that going straight to a games company is also a good way to get a job)
Don’t exaggerate details
Be honest
Make sure that there aren’t any mistakes. Especially of applying for a role as QA
Interview tips
A few of the tip for writing a CV were also iterated when talking about the interview for the job.
Know the role that I’m applying for.
Prepare for the interview for knowing what you want to say.
Know what my strengths are and ask about if there are any weaknesses after the interview.
Use examples in real-life situations to provide evidence that I can work well.
Otherwise don’t put silly things in the CV.
1 CV was show that had a reasonably sensible start in which the applicant said that he likes music. However his fatal flaw was that the then went on to list each genres of music that he enjoyed.
It is fine to outline what my likes/ dislikes are but do not go into detail since a CV is a short document that outlines me.

Most of the “Technical framework” portion on Thomas’s presentation was completely irrelevant but did make sense since I had done testing on this framework for the facebook game Bubbletown, Other than that what Thomas said about building a CV is very relevant and does assure me that I’ve not done anything particularly wrong. Not panicking at the interview is also a good thing to do. But only time will tell if that will happenm